She doesn’t think of them as much anymore. For many years after her dad died and her brother left for college, she could think of nothing else. But since then, she’s lived an entire life. Their faces ripple in her memory, as blurry as the softly lit caves beneath her feet. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven that day, wearing an old pair of boys’ swimming trunks, her chest bare, yellow plastic floaties Velcroed to her arms. She remembers being scared as they descended into the cave, huddling so close to Lucas that he eventually picked her up and carried her the rest of the way down. Looking over his shoulder, her arms wrapped around her brother’s neck, her eyes found Kirby. He winked at her. And she wasn’t afraid anymore.
The manatees dive deep and leave her alone on the surface. The water is so clear here that she can still see them, playing in the caves below, the lights swirling around their thick, graceful bodies. She dives, too. Down, past the staircase she walked with her brother and father; down, past the platform where scuba divers sat to pull on their flippers and oxygen masks; down, into the caves where the manatees are playing. The pressure in her lungs feels good, the same way her arms feel good after paddling for hours—like her body is wide awake. She holds her breath for a long time, dragging it out to the very edge of her capacity. Here, deep down, surrounded by dark and light in equal measure, her brain is quiet. She isn’t scared. She isn’t hungry or thirsty. She isn’t too hot. She’s just floating, holding on to one of the manatees to resist her body’s insistence on rising to the surface. There is no qualifier, she just is.
But the manatee understands better than she does that she’s been down here too long. That this isn’t where she belongs. It brings her up gradually, nudging her toward the world she’d rather not rejoin. Her ears pop as she rises and the moment of gentle nothingness ends. There is pain again. In her eardrums, in her lungs, behind her eyes. Her head breaks the surface and she gasps, heaving, lying across the manatee’s sedentary bulk while its partner circles them both, rubbing its bristly snout against Wanda’s legs. Water trickles out of her ears and sound returns. Her breath evens out. The manatees leave her here and dive deep once more. She feels exposed suddenly, floating on her back, spent. The safety of the caves has left her. The gentle company of the manatees is far away. The memory of her father’s face and her brother’s arms recedes. The lights shiver, agitated. They whisper to her, a frequency she couldn’t possibly explain, not sound, not even light, just an inexplicable knowing, passing seamlessly from one consciousness to another. And what they tell her is this—Someone is coming.
Chapter 51
A year after Kirby’s death, after his own departure, Lucas announced that he was coming back for a visit, and Phyllis didn’t know what to feel. It was after the government had given up on Florida, but before the official deadline to evacuate had passed—a deadline she had no intention of meeting. She worried that he was coming to take Wanda back to California with him. It would make sense. They’d had their year together. The arrangement had always been temporary. And despite her apprehension, it would be good for Wanda to see her brother again. It would be good for Phyllis, too. She wanted them to be together, to be happy. She just wished it didn’t mean losing them both.
Lucas texted photos as he drove across the country—roadside attractions, national parks, selfies from the driver’s seat of his car—and Wanda’s excitement increased with every message. When he got to the border, though, he was turned away by the National Guard. They were getting people out, not letting them in, they told him. He called Phyllis from the edge of Alabama and told her not to worry. He said he’d find another way.
A week later, he arrived aboard a fishing boat coming down the Intracoastal. He told Phyllis that it was easy enough to park his car in Georgia and then find a boat that would take him south, but they both understood that “easy” was a relative term. It was a great deal harder to come to Rudder than it had been a year ago. How difficult would it be to visit in another year? In two? The tethers between this part of the world and the rest were coming loose, and that meant certain things that neither of them was ready to reckon with. He slept on the couch and spent his days letting Wanda show him the things she’d learned and everything that had changed. So much had changed. Phyllis cooked for them and cleaned up after them and it felt almost like being in a play, saying the lines a mother might as convincingly as she could. But she enjoyed it. She liked the chatter while they ate, the nearness of them while she worked in the kitchen or the garden, how still Wanda sat when Lucas braided her hair into intricate patterns. Where had he learned such things?
Lucas and Phyllis studiously avoided the question of when he would leave and whether he would take Wanda with him. But they had to speak of it eventually. One night, he waited until Wanda was asleep, and caught Phyllis before she went upstairs.
“I have to start thinking about getting back,” he told her.
“So soon,” she said.
She already knew he had a job waiting for him, and then the fall semester after that. He’d found summer work on a firefighting crew. It was easy work to find—out west, the fires were bigger, the droughts longer, the temperatures so hot pavement melted and power grids failed. None of it was new, but a place can only take so much. Rural towns were beginning to disappear, blinking off like dead bulbs on a strand of Christmas lights, while the cities soldiered on. Soon, even the epicenters would falter. Phyllis didn’t need to say any of this. She could see it on his face—they both knew.
“I’d stay longer if I could, but the crew is shorthanded as it is.”
“I understand.”
“Wanda…” he began, then stopped. They stared at one another and Phyllis waited for him to claim his sister. “I asked her what she wanted to do,” he continued. “Where she wanted to live. And…she doesn’t want to come to California with me.” His voice fell ever so slightly as he said this.
“Oh.” Phyllis waited.
“I know what it feels like to be snatched away when you don’t want to leave. And I don’t want to do that to her. But I also…I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back. It’ll be a while. And I—well, let’s be honest, Florida cell towers are running on borrowed time. Either they fall apart on their own or they shut down. What happens when they go? This place just disappears, Phyllis. I’m not sure I can spend two weeks just getting here every summer. If I can even count on the fishing boats next year. And how the hell do I get back? How long will that take? I don’t know what to do. She’s my responsibility, I can’t just leave her. And I can’t drag her off, neither. But I can’t be in two places at once. It’s either California or…this.” He swung his hands around, as if he were holding all of Rudder in his arms for just a second, then he let them fall into his lap. “And I don’t…I don’t want this.”
“It’s okay. I do,” Phyllis said, patting his arm. “We do. Want this.”
“I see what you mean now, about it getting worse out there. I really do. It’s just going to be Florida all over again. Slower, maybe. Or faster, who knows. It’s not like one is better than the other when it’s all headed down the same road.”